My Dad was an Ambulance man Ooop North and was called to some grotty dark, wet and miserable set of railway sidings one night after a locomotive driver reported that he had hit some one with his shunting engine.

So, there's my Dad and his oppo, plus a railway foreman and 2 of the Lancs Contabulary's finest searching for a body. They found it and my Dad reported that it was in pretty good condition for a railway casualty (he was old tramp, apparently...er the casualty, not my Dad.)

Sadly, the casualty's head was missing, so, leaving a copper to look after the railway foreman who had fainted and cracked his head on the line, the team began to serach a little further down the line, then up the line, then down again. It was of course dark and as wet as it gets in Manchester and it apparently took some time.

Eventually his oppo found it not 6 feet away from the body. "I've found it !" he called holding the swede up and illuminating it with his torch.

"Nah!" says my Dad, "He was taller than that !"

The two coppers weren't amused, nor was the foreman who had just regained consciousness at that critical time.

Medical, dark humour........it's still out there, thank God, or we'd all crack - up pretty sharpish.

Copper friend of mine in Glasgow many years ago came across an attemped suicide who had jumped off the Kingston Bridge and successfully missed the Clyde but had broken both legs on the road instead. PC A*** grabs matey by the arms and drags him across the road. It was the end of the shift and across the road was someone elses patch

Mate of mine is a fireman, they get called out to a suicide on a railway. Body is pretty much cut to ribbons and spread along 200-300 yards of line. So off they go and start picking up the bits and pieces and placing them on a sort of stretcher. Walking along and one fireman says to my mate:-

Last Tuesday afternoon I am laid out on the operating table in my local hospital having a biopsy done on a skin cancer on my face. The surgeon removed the offending growth and then "heat sealed" the site, in other words, used very hot metal to give me a third degree burn on the raw site. The smell was, well, not as nice as bacon under the grill. I said something to that effect.

The nurse helping the doc asked the doc if he had heard about the patient who had complained about the smell when the same thing was dione to him the previous week. "Oh", said the doctor, "What did the surgeon say?" Nursey replied "He told the patient he should think about how Joan of Arc must have felt".